FREE LOVE LETTERS

Love letter # 338

Looking at your behaviour, (analysing your words, checking out your body language, noting what you seem to prioritise), it occurs to me that you may have it all wrong.

I do not love you for your money or your success – am not drawn to your status and apparent power. I care not for your gold chains; for what are they but expensively assembled shackles? I do not bleed for the bright lights you show me. I lose no sleep over bigger, better, brighter.

And your palace – that shiny, hard faced edifice you wall yourself behind – it is little than a pile of rocks made pretty. A decorated gaol.

So I look at you now and I wonder – who is this person? Are you still the one who sparkled so wonderfully? Was it you who sidled into my world with deep and connective beauty? Who said they would risk it all for the notion of us?

I only ask because sometimes that person seems like somebody else – and certainly not the career obsessed, supposedly strong, wealth accruing conformist who sits across from me now.

Tell me, when did our love become a routine; a sequence of expensive gifts and hard wrung promises? Something we squeezed in between flat screen TVs, bucket listing and retirement plans?

For this garbage, I shall never again wear these rings. For this shallow approximation of care I can no longer kneel.

Yet for the spark, the private truth, the compass we can still offer one another … everything and then some.

Our world mistakes the trappings for the substance and we have both played along and struggled against this. We damn well know this. How many nights have we lain together in exhausted recognition pondering this?

So why? Why gold and not love? Why success and not joy? Why the act but rarely the meaning?

Perhaps you can answer these questions, or at least address them in some truthful and hopeful way. Remind me of the human being beneath the outfit and of the vital contextualising details that help us to make sense of all the discrepancies.

I still see the one I love before me and there is still plenty of love left to go – but I will not spend it on shimmer or shine. Only for the simple signs of your heart. For who you truly are.